Abrahim El Gamal

Take a look at the tag of your shirt and chances are you’ll see the words “polyester” or “nylon," the synthetic fibers floating on the market alongside cotton since around World War II. They're cheap, stretchy, and stain resistant – but derived from fossil fuel hydrocarbons, so unlike cotton, silk, wool, and leather that decompose over time, they last an eternity in landfills.

The Lipid A family of glycolipids, found in the outer membranes of all Gram-negative bacteria, exhibits considerable structural diversity in both lipid and glycan moieties. The lack of facile methods to prepare analogues of these natural products represents a major roadblock in understanding the relationship between their structure and immunomodulatory activities. Here we present a modular, cell-free multienzymatic platform to access these structure–activity relationships.

The chemical syntheses with structures in the original Supporting Information was inadvertently truncated. The correct and complete Supporting Information is available here.